Twitter Fake Followers, The Ups, The Downs and The Waste Of Space!

If you are on Twitter you will have heard of “Fake Followers“, if you haven’t then let me give you a little information about them, putting it simply, these are accounts that are created for the purposes of falsifying people follower counts and can also be used as potential spammers.

Celebrities Are The Worst For Fake Followers On Twitter!

You can’t believe it when you see how much of a following some of these big celebrities have on Twitter, they are in the millions, but when it comes to the numbers, do you realise that millions of their followers are actually fake or inactive account!

Take as an example, Justin Bieber, now while I was compiling this article I did a check on his Twitter account to get the current numbers that he has following (I may have to say that these number are not 100%, but they give you the idea).

Anyway, I digress, Justin Bieber has 40,638,393 followers, 19,912,813 (49% are fake) and 32% are inactive. That’s nearly 20 million FAKE followers, how bad is that!

What Does This Mean For The Everyday Non-Celebrity Tweeter?

Now as I said this is an example using Justin Bieber’s number, but when it comes to the every day tweeter, like myself and probably you reading this article, those massive numbers are nothing to us.

But, when we get those fake followers jumping on to our Twitter accounts it shows a lot more.

My own personal experience is I had a massive influx of followers on my Twitter account sometime back which I didn’t think much of and bathed in the moment of a bigger following, but on closer inspection these followers were a fake accounts, thankfully Twitter in its wisdom does a cull every so often so they started falling off my account.

But this shows in your stats for your Twitter and these sudden rises and falls don’t look good at all and if you are one of the many that “auto follows back” on Twitter (which I don’t recommend), then you will get caught in the trap of even more coming your way.

How Can You Tell These Accounts Just Aren’t Right?

For me I use a website that allows me to “vet” my new followers, enabling me to see their bios, avatars, tweets, friends and follower counts to help me make the decision on who I should follow or not. I use the website SocialOomph, you could also use Tweetdeck to check out new followers.

7 Points To Remember When Checking Your New Twitter Followers

An avatar doesn’t mean a thing, just because it looks professional or legitimate it may not be, it’s easy for people to copy a twitter account! Eggs are a big no no!

There can be many reasons why you will get a big influx of fake accounts following you, it can be from simply using a hash tag that is being watched, or even that you’ve become quite popular on Twitter to even posting up a video of the latest movie blockbuster!

But they can’t really do you any harm, as long as you don’t click on links or fall in to the trap of the DMs (Direct Messages) that they may send you if you follow them!

Although many will argue that by having a large amount of fake followers does make you look bad to other users, but lets face it, if the fake accounts follow you, the only thing you can do is BLOCK them and sometimes it can take a while to sift through your followers or wait for Twitter to cull the bad users.

So it’s best to keep on guard from the start and make sure you know who you are following and don’t just follow people of Twitter for the followers, always remember: Quality Over Quantity 😉

There also seems to be the latest movement from spammers to “Favourite” your tweets to get your attention, you may have noticed that you have been getting your tweets selected by some rather strange Twitter accounts, 4 times out of 10 these are Fake Followers, so be weary!

Over To You Dear Reader Now It’s Your Turn

Have you recently had a large a amount of these rather dodgy looking user follow you?

What have you done about it?

Do you have a technique or use any websites that help you organise who you follow?

So please let us know what you do about Fake Followers on Twitter and what you think about them (keep it clean though lol).

Karen Woodham is the founder and owner of the Blazing Minds, an avid blogger and bona fide journalist. She is also a Cinema Film Reviewer, based in Rhyl, where she reviews the latest movies, she has also had several articles published in various publications. She has recently become an Award Winning Blogger, Radio Presenter and is listed in the UKs Top 10 Film Blogs.

It does seem to be a issue with Twitter recently, I’ve noticed a sudden build up in Russian followers that seem to tweet out all the same links!

http://blazingminds.co.uk Karen Woodham

I get loads of those, I think it may be that I’m a bit of a twitter-holic and they pick up on it!

http://slappybear.co.uk Slappy Bear

I’m really considering putting a stop to using the auto follow technique, I seem to be getting some pretty bad followers lately. I’ll have to vet my followers.

http://www.sweetsfoods.com/ Gera

Karen I receive tons of fake followers on a weekly basis. I check by hand and see what follows (to not follow them):

As you said only eggs no no
Only RTing automatically
Evident fake celebs
Only broadcasting links
Following you and the last tweet was a year ago – yep I had those
Pursuing a hashtag, in general is a no.
Several musicians who I don’t have a clue about them..
Tweeting themes I’m not interested
And I can go on…

Finally, I use lists to organize things!

http://blazingminds.co.uk Karen Woodham

I’ve always been one for utilising lists on Twitter, very helpful, I very rarely visit the “home” feed, I just use my lists instead, that way I can see what’s going on far more easily 😉

http://www.oceanofweb.com Atul Kumar

I didn’t imagine that these famous celebrities has huge fan-base count due to fake followers. I used to think that since these are celebs, so ppl are following them.

I am further suprised to see stats of Justin Bieber that out of total 100% followers, his fan-base is 49% fake and 32% inactive, which means 81% are that of fake and useless accounts and only 19% are real and that’s worth of use.

http://blazingminds.co.uk Karen Woodham

You’d be surprised how many celebrities fake their followers, by doing a simple search on the internet, you’ll find loads of websites that give lists of the top fakers on Twitter 😉

http://sizwemahlala.blogspot.com/ Sizwe

Karen, some really good tips – we’re just getting started on Twitter at Wonkie and it was a bit discouraging to see other tweeters with tens of thousands of followers. Knowing that they are likely not all real (especially those that just shot up suddenly!) is encouraging.

Sizwe

http://blazingminds.co.uk Karen Woodham

Thanks for stopping by and thank you, I can’t see the point of buying all the fake followers to be honest, sometimes people think that Twitter is just a numbers game and it isn’t!